UMBC has provided me with the opportunity to discover passions that will carry through my personal, professional, and academic careers…Being a double major has helped me focus on the intersections of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality in all of my artistic and scholarly work. Through my experiences in the Theatre Department and the Gender and Women’s Studies department, I’ve focused on using my work to show how art is inherently valuable, and how social justice issues are important to every aspect of our lives.

Ally Kocerhan is a Linehan Artist Scholar who served as director of Christopher Durang’s challenging one-act play “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You” as part of the theatre department’s Studio 3 production in 2016.

She commented on the too classes that especially influenced her career at UMBC: “Gender, Sexuality, and Theatrical performance taught by Dr. Susan McCully and Feminist Perspectives in Transnational Cinema taught by Dr. Viviana MacManus opened my eyes to the deep connections between social justice, identity, and art.”

Kocerhan is particularly interested in the intersection of politics and the arts. “(At Cal Arts) I will be studying subjects such as Arts Activism, Critical Theory, Critical Discourse in the Arts, Feminist and Queer perspectives in Art and Politics, and Contemporary Political Thought.”